Vanderlei Martins, a professor of physics and researcher with the Joint Center for Earth Systems Technology (JCET) joined Sheilah Kast on Maryland Morning to discuss his cube satellite or CubeSat project. Martins is working with students, other professors and NASA scientists to build the backpack-sized satellite. Martins plans to use his tiny satellite to study the role of aerosols, particles in the atmosphere, in cloud formation. Aerosols, he says, are essential for forming clouds. If there weren’t any aerosols there wouldn’t be any clouds.

Richard Forno was interviewed by the Associated Press about cyber attacks on the rise in Utah.

“Utah state officials have seen what they describe as a sharp uptick in attempts to hack into state computers in the last two years, and they think it related to the NSA data center south of Salt Lake City,”

wrote the Associated Press.

“Maybe these hackers are thinking: ‘If we can attack state systems, we can get info that NSA isn’t releasing,”

said Richard Forno.

Where does this leave Utah? Forno and Tim Junio, a cybersecurity researcher at Stanford University, say that the NSA data center may interest hackers who think they can get to the NSA by targeting state-run facilities that power the center.

Richard Forno, assistant director for UMBC’s Center for Cybersecurity, made an
appearance on All Sides With Ann Fisher, a public radio program broadcast out ofColumbus, Ohio to discuss cybersecurity and corporate accountability. Mandy Trimble was sitting in for Fisher. Guests along with Forno were: Joseph Marks, a cybersecurity reporter for Politico Pro, and Dakota Rudesill, an assistant professor of law at the Moritz College of Law, The Ohio State University.

Trimble posed the question to Forno, should we implement corporate accountability in the event of cybersecurity breaches. Forno said, there is the “practicality of accountability,” because “problems like this [cybersecurity breaches] are quite likely to occur.”

“Would we “hold someone accountable for a traffic jam on the way to work?”

The Grandmaster (GM) title is the highest title a chess player can earn, is difficult to achieve and can take quite some time to accomplish.

To win the title, a player must achieve a certain score (number of wins) in a tournament with a certain number of highly rated titled players (Grandmasters) present and at least three of them must be from a foreign country.

“It is not so easy to locate tournaments–or host ones–that meet this criteria in the U.S.,” says Joel DeWyer, business manager of UMBC’s chess team. “A player has to do this at three separate tournaments that meet this criteria.”

DeWyer says that, “In Tanguy’s case, he [Ringoir] knew that he needed at least one win and a draw in his final two games at the tournament in order to earn his final norm. One loss and it would have all escaped him.”

For Ringoir, earning the GM title will also open the door to several elite tournaments around the world.

In the quest to make a better battery Evgenia Barannikova, a graduate student at UMBC in the department of chemistry and biochemistry, has isolated a peptide, a small sequence of amino acids, which binds to lithium manganese nickel oxide (LMNO), a material that can be used to make high performance batteries.

“Biology provides several tools for us to solve important problems,” said Evgenia Barannikova, a graduate student at UMBC. Barannikova works in the lab of Mark Allen and studies how biological molecules in general can improve the properties of inorganic materials in batteries. “By mimicking biological processes we can find the better solution,” she told phys.org

On February 3 Ellen Hemmerly, executive director, of bwtech@UMBC spoke with AHA
Business Radio. She talked about her career path, the economic impact of
bwtech@UMBC on the Baltimore metropolitan area and the benefits of being at bwtech@UMBC.

“We welcome a diverse set of companies,” she said, “but they have to be technology companies.”

Hemmerly says that bwtech@UMBC is not just about real estate, but that it’s about helping companies to grow and succeed.